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Free flash-card spaced learning




2008-08-23: 1500 Spanish words in one month

15 years ago, I learned Spanish. I was never fluent, but I could read simple text.

Two months ago, most of that Spanish was gone. I got a deck of almost 3000 cards (1500 Spanish to English, 1500 English to Spanish) and started spaced learning.

I eased into it: 100-200 words a day. After 3 weeks, I had seen every card at least once, and many repeatedly. I spent about 25 minutes per day doing this.

It's almost eerie how the algorithm presents a word just as I feel it's starting to fade from memory. Now, I'm down to repeating some 50 words per day, and it's much quicker than the initial learning phase. Supposedly, 50 will decline to 20, then ten, then five... Once the facts stick in your brain, it takes so little to maintain it, but it does require that you spend a few minutes per day.